How was your year? Seriously. How was it? What did you do? What did you learn?

When asked this question at a cocktail party or an interview, many people go blank and it is a big missed opportunity.

Don’t even think about saying “same old, same old”. Not only is it probably not true, it just shows that you are too lazy to think of something interesting.

If you did something big like change jobs, then it’s easy. You can ride the “new job” train for about nine months and then it’s not new anymore. For everyone else, you need to actually spend some time looking at your calendar from February and April and those other months you can’t remember.

All the memories will come flooding back: that awful conference, that great presentation, the month your boss was away and you got to take over. Those are the things you need to be able to talk about.

You might even want to work them into your resume. At the very least, practice telling the story about the things that you did. I am not suggesting that you bore your cousins to death by telling them the minute details of how you implemented a new quality assurance standard. Just distill it into a couple of sound bites. Those typically go well with eggnog and cookies.

So flip through Outlook and make a list. You might be surprised. Maybe it was a pretty good year after all.